Time to CHAT? Mapping "Regulatory Resistance" in the West

"Mining companies like to say, 'The gold is where the gold is, that's where we need to go,'" said Chet Van Dellen, GIS coordinator for Nevada's Department of Wildlife. "We like to say the animals are where the animals are." New high-tech maps detail wildlife habitat in West, Scott Sonner, 12/13/13

Late last week a coalition of western governors released a new tool meant to help gold miners, transportation designers, energy companies - just about anybody with a natural resource impact - to plan development projects. CHAT, the Crucial Habitat Assessment Tool, going to be one big map for the West, and although it's not entirely filled out yet, the idea is to show those gold miners, hey, here's where our important habitats are. It pays to be clear: the maps are not, as the AP's headline suggests, simply mapping wildlife habitat in greater detail. The tool's resolution is somewhat impressive - down to the square mile - but what it's really doing is visualizing the spaces where project managers can expect to run into problems getting their permits. Some habitats will not be as crucial or as much of a priority as others. The difference may be subtle, but on it turns the role mapping plays in setting the public agenda in environmental governance today.

Here's how CHAT works. Each state has gathered a bunch of data and assigned weights to different kinds of habitats, on a scale from 1-6 (most to least important). The weights are based on information like the condition of habitat as well as economic significance. Each state has its own process, and very often, it's got its very own personal CHAT tool. You should expect no less from the West, and this brand of formal coordination, was likely what got every single western state on board. What CHAT isn't is a project to get all states on board to a similar standard for evaluating habitat significance. It's just meant to project (in the mapping sense) the standards each one already has. Take a look at some of the screenshots of the map if you haven't already, because you can see differences in regulatory regimes on the map.

A CHAT map. From: http://trib.com/news/state-and-regional/the-big-picture-western-governors-unveiling-high-tech-satellite-wildlife/article_7b95cf0e-496e-51df-b324-2a5f929a2232.html

Where you'd expect some important habitats to cross-cut state boundaries, like in Yellowstone, we see that they cut off at Montana, either because the state hasn't gotten around to doing it's categorization yet or because that habitat simply isn't as important to Montana as it is to Wyoming. CHAT is meant to show all western states so that if you're a pipeliner you can see what sort of regulatory resistance you're going to run into across your entire project. Or if you're a gold miner, you can easily see whether it'll be easier to do a project in Utah or Arizona.

It may have been five years in the making, but it's roots go back way further. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to start at the Articles of Confederation to get a sense of what kind of coordination this represents: federalism. Not only does each state gets to develop and share its own particular habitat standards, the map is a way for states to show federal authorities that, hey, we've got everything under control here, much as they are doing with candidate species rulings. More concretely, though, we only have to go back to the mid 90s to understand why we have CHAT now. Federal listing of endangered species like the northern spotted owl generated what boil down to two calls, two sides of the same coin really: state-led environmental policy, and economics-sensitive environmental policy. It'd be no understatement to say that most environmental politics in the West for the past 20 years has been an outgrowth, good or bad, to the issues raised at that time. Utah's and Oregon's governors, on separate sides of the aisle, have developed a set of principles they dubbed, "Enlibra" that they've promoted in the WGA. Enlibra is a new regulatory regime whose ambit is reconciling economic growth and environmental protection, and we've gotten ecosystem services markets and community forestry alike, to name a few examples, out of it. As a prioritization tool rather than a data display tool, CHAT is straight out of the Enlibra playbook.

But here's what it all comes back to: I can't help but feeling that CHAT is like showing your opponent your hand in a game of cards. Of course, it's not like the Nevada Department of Wildlife or some other agency couldn't say, "psych!" and go back on their promise of little regulatory resistance: the map isn't immutable. That also means there's no reason they couldn't go back on their promise of heavy regulatory resistance. The map is a curious legal entity. There's no mandate for all western states to make it: it doesn't have to exist or be used. But it sort of justifies its own existence. All I mean is that by putting the map - described as a "pro-development tool" by the Nevada Department of Wildlife - out there into the world, it's going to be hard to take it back. Developers, regulators, and even the Center for Biological Diversity like it, and that gives it a ton of legitimacy that goes beyond its ambiguous legal status. 

All the cards are on the table now in the West. It's not clear yet whether that's a good thing. It'll probably make regulators' lives easier, for one. There's also certainly a power in being the one to set the terms of engagement. Either way, maps like CHAT are going to play an important role in the making of the relationship between states, nature, and capital in the near term. Just take a look at the interactive maps the Coastal Resilience Network has set up that allows users to choose how important different economic and ecological variables are to determining great places to do restoration. It's not a regulatory map (yet), but you can imagine some of the opportunities that it would afford regulators. It'd make it easier for them to say, for instance, hey, we made the map based on how users (citizens?), not us, weighted restoration priorities. It's not our fault...Stay tuned for more.

Scaling up? Difficulties in the prioritization, selection, and evaluation of restoration sites for Oregon's ecosystem services market

I gave a talk today at the World Conference on Ecological Restoration here in Madison, WI. It's a take on how restoration sites in the Oregon wetland mitigation market are planned for, chosen, and evaluated, and ends with a discussion of what the case may suggest for other markets. It's something I've addressed in other ways, to other audiences, here, here and here. Oh, and here and here, too! My argument in the talk is that efforts to concentrate on watershed needs and processes may not be so easily implemented when it comes to mitigation markets, though that's likely to differ from region to region. Below you can find the slides and text.

Scaling up? SER 2013 presentation - Eric Nost from ericnost

Thanks for coming. I’ll be sharing just a slice of some recent research which is part of a larger NSF-funded project on stream mitigation banking here in the US.

The message I hope yall can take home today is this: efforts to concentrate on watershed needs and processes in ensuring greater ecological returns from restoration may not be so easily implemented when it comes to mitigation markets. Outcomes are likely to differ from region to region, however. PES promoters regularly call for spatially-explicit approaches to restoration, but on the ground their efforts run into resistance from the entrepreneurs at the heart of these markets. Their concerns are both economic and ecological.

I’ll make the argument by taking us through how restoration sites in the Oregon market are planned for, chosen, and evaluated, ending with a discussion of what the case may suggest for other markets.

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We’ll start here. Welcome to the HML restoration site in exurban PDX.

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It’s one site in a regional market for aquatic ecosystem services, providing several. The wetland you see stores and delays water, for instance, mitigating flood impacts for downstream homes.

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The stream, OTOH, provides habitat for salmon that migrate into the foothills of the Coast Range.

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And so on January 25, 2012, the Oregon Department of State Lands (DSL) authorized the sale of mitigation credits representing this salmon habitat to the Tualatin Hills Parks and Recreation Department (THPRD). Now, it’s absolutely worth taking just a second to make sure we’re on the same page about how mitigation markets work. In US markets for wetland and stream ecosystems, federal environmental regulatory agencies – ACOE, EPA, in conjunction with state agencies like DSL - permit developers to compensate for unavoidable resource degradation by paying entrepreneurs (or, “mitigation bankers”) who speculatively restore ecosystems. At HML, DSL is the banker, but usually it is private industry.

DSL did not sell the Half Mile Lane (HML) property itself to THPRD. Instead, it sold credits - measures of both the quality and quantity of habitat created after the agency replaced a culvert and performed other restoration there.

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THPRD wanted these credits so it could tell regulators that it had adequately compensated for a trail bridge it is building that will degrade habitat elsewhere in the watershed.

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The idea is to ensure some kind/degree of equivalence between resource impact and resource restored, in order to accomplish a no net loss of function and acreage. This is the art and science of assessment.

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HML is operated by DSL, but it is a testing grounds for the WP, TNC and other cons developing what they see as more rigorous assessment methods and protocols for Oregon’s market and beyond. HML embodies 3 big moves in market-based environmental governance. While it’d be nice to go through all of them, given the growing number of calls for watershed approaches to how sites are chosen and evaluated - here at the conference, for instance - I want to focus on this last point. We can chat later about any of them.

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Indeed, mapping and modelling landscape interactions at existing and possible restoration sites is increasingly recognized as an important component of site evaluation. The idea is that a site like HML’s ES are spatially dependent, or contextual - relative to what’s going on up and down the watershed. Think of it like this: if you restore a wetland in the middle of nowhere and no one’s around to benefit from how it retains flood waters, does it provide an ES? For many, the answer is no.

The international think-tank for ecosystem services accounting, TEEB, for instance, note that the specific provision of services depends on the site. The work of the wetland at HML to store and delay water matters because there are homes in the 100 year floodplain downstream that benefit.

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Cons bio and head of NCP, Gretchen Daily concurs. She calls for focusing on the right places in the landscape that leverage high ecological returns on investments.

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HML’s position, for instance, allows it to slow down and cycle the increased runoff from logging, quarrying operations.

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Such calls from conservationists have in fact made it into policy. In 2008, ACOE and EPA put out a new rulemaking formalizing many aspects of the mitigation market nationally. The rule called for states and regions to implement strategic approaches to restoration siting, rather than sites being chosen opportunistically, in reference to cost or availability or interest..

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And to bring it back to DSL, the value of a wetland means its opportunity to provide an ecological function/service based on where it is.

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So not only is landscape ecological assessment and prioritization on the minds of conservationists and of official interest to the feds,  it’s central to DSL, and in the rules in OR. But it’s one thing to be on the books and another to be in force on the ground. The question is: how does restoration siting actually play out in OR?

There are three moments to it, but they are moments that put the interests of regs and cons against those of private entrepreneurs.  In the short-term, at least, entrepreneurs’ work is made difficult in 3 ways by regs and cons’ new metrics and approaches. In the rest of this talk I’ll walk us through these 3 moments and 3 difficulties to siting.

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In the first moment, ecologically-trained consultants to bankers work in the office with several online mapping utilities to gage how ecological processes occur across the landscape and affect the site where bankers have chosen to do restoration.

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Here’s one of the key mapping utilities consultants use, called Oregon Explorer. Hydric soils are the orange/yellow, but we also see the 100 year floodplain downstream of the HML. Consultants have to answer questions about landscape context by using OE to, for instance, draw a 2 mile radius circle around the site to see how many other similar habitats the site is connected to in the area, or what sources of ecological stress are nearby, like the quarry. The key point here is that the assessment of a banker’s site is relational to the site’s surroundings – but these are things which the banker has no or little control over.

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Whatever their score, bankers then have to take their numbers to the agencies and staff judge the offsite stressors and risks consultants find in their assessment, approving, modifying, or denying an entrepreneur’s choice of where to do restoration.

Agencies also categorize wetlands. Some kinds of wetlands in the landscape mosaic are more market-worthy than others. For instance, DSL has written farmed floodplain wetland sites off the map in a recent rule. Based on a series of reports on long-term success and failure, DSL doesn’t think they restore a lot of the storm water retention services that the wetlands in urban areas - where the majority of impacts are  - provide. They didn’t meet watershed needs. In the rule, a farmed wetland is seen as not hydrologically degraded and so restoring it wouldn’t bring back hydrological functions. Bankers disagree on ecological grounds: these kinds of wetlands have been tilled, tiled, and plowed. They think those are precisely the sites that need to be restored in the landscape.

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Now, when bankers finally do get their bank approved, they get credits to sell. What non-profit conservationists want to see happen in the market is that when a banker brings a site to the market, the amount of credits they can sell would depend in large part on the location of their project.

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These are “priority areas” - habitat sites mapped by state environmental agencies, and collated by TNC.

The idea is that if they were doing restoration in a priority area bankers would get the full amount of credits they normally would and receive less if they were not in a priority area. But potentially restorable properties in priority areas are on average slightly more expensive than elsewhere, and this could cut into bankers’ profits. Perhaps more crucially, it drastically cuts into their potential range of sites to choose from, when finding a site tends to be more luck than anything anyway. And bankers also wonder how priority areas were chosen, often noting that their sites have plenty to offer as important.

The point is that this sort of watershed plan, something called for in the 2008 federal rule, makes some places obviously more valuable than others to do restoration, and that’s a big shift. It may make the market more like any other traditional market, but now working outside a priority may not earn bankers as many credits as it would have. To be clear, this isn’t yet implemented, but it’s very much on the table because of the federal rule.

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So we can start wrapping up. We can pull out 3 points of difficulty in the market:

1) The priorities aren’t necessarily what bankers see as priorities, and even the idea of prioritizing is limiting, at least right now, in comparison with current practice.

2 The categorization of wetlands in the landscape isn’t how bankers would address watershed needs..

3)They’re asked to account for offsite processes they have little control over

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Because of all this, bankers are hesitant about starting new projects. No private entrepreneur has done a project with the new landscape focused metrics and rules yet.

But this isn’t simply because bankers don’t get the gospel of landscape ecology. Bankers’ considerations are both economic and ecological - it’s sometimes bad for business, sometimes not what they see as the right ecological priority. So how have regs and cons been able to put forth such a strong vision of their own in the first place? Markets around the country vary and a lot of discretion about which watershed plans to choose and metrics to use is left to regional, district, or state staff. In a place like OR, with strong institutional momentum behind planning/zoning, regulators are more willing to make and point at maps and say, do resto here. With better data collection and availability, they’re also just more able to. Regs and cons’ ability to come out with a strong plan very much reflects the Oregon context..

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The conclusion to takeaway is that in spite of calls from TEEB, Gretchen Daily, and others, efforts on the ground to improve the assessment and consideration of watershed/landscape needs in restoration run into resistance when implemented in restoration markets. The causes stem from both differing economic and ecological viewpoints, but this resistance will differ from place to place. What’s implied is that in some places, there may be other approaches to addressing watershed needs within a compensatory mitigation framework that are more effective than relying on private entrepreneurs, who have economic and ecological hesitations. We don’t have to look any further than HML - DSL’s own bank - for an example, and similar approaches exist nationally. But that’s going to have to be the topic of another talk.

A look at RESTORE Act implementation

What would you do if you had about a billion dollars for ecological restoration?

That's exactly what the Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Council (or, Council) is trying to figure out. That's no easy task given that the Council is a powerhouse, high-level government entity composed of the five Gulf Coast governors and six executive branch Cabinet members (think secretaries of Agriculture, Interior, Homeland Security, Commerce, EPA administrator, etc.)The Council came into being when President Obama signed the RESTORE Act last year. That Act put 80% of the Clean Water Act fines BP and Transocean are going to pay for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill into the hands of the Council. It's the largest pot of money for restoration in the US ever.

Question is, how do you even go about spending that much money in a time when any sort of surplus in government hands seems like the work of a divine hand, and so usually gets cannibalized in the ritual sacrifices that follow? [Update: the sequester is already taking a 5% toll on RESTORE Act funds] Well, this Council has a comprehensive plan. More accurately, as of late last week the Council has put out their initial comprehensive plan that describes the principles for how it will distribute money to various Gulf Coast restoration projects and programs. I had the chance to read it; here are my initial reactions:

1. "The decisions made pursuant to the Plan will be based on the best available science, and this Plan will evolve over time to incorporate new science, information, and changing conditions. The Council will coordinate with the scientific community to improve decision-making." (5)It's a living, breathing document. It's meant to change over time, as funding levels and priorities change, but also with new science. Whether scientists can tell them what they want or need to hear, is of course another question.

2. No one actually knows how much money there is, since so much of it is tied to pending litigation. The number could go up past 10 billion when BP pays up.

3. The plan doesn't actually spell out how the Council will fund anything, nor what it would most like to fund. A funding strategy and priorities list come later.

4. "Storm risk, land loss, depletion of natural resources, compromised water quality and quantity, and sea-level rise are imperiling coastal communities’ natural defenses and ability to respond to natural and man-made disruptions." (4) It's clear that the Council sees ecosystem health as fundamental to community health, though no necessarily vice versa, and that this means a weaker ability to adapt to future climate and other disasters.

5. Scientists do seem to have gotten across the point that restoring species alone, on postage-stamp size sites is not the best approach to restoration. "The Council recognizes that upland, estuarine, and marine habitats are intrinsically connected, and will promote ecosystem-based and landscape-scale restoration without regard to geographic location within the Gulf Coast region." The planners apparently see themselves as immune to geographic bias and politics, and there's some good landscape ecology here.

6. It only comes up once, but it's unclear what the role of the private sector is here. However, much ado is made about coordinating with other efforts, in general: "The Council will encourage partnerships and welcome additional public and private financial and technical support to maximize outcomes and impacts. Such partnerships will add value through integration of public and private sector skills, knowledge, and expertise" (7) There are a growing number of voluntary restoration projects in the works, not to mention talk of linking up with California's cap and trade scheme for wetland blue carbon credits, and how to coordinate these market sector activities with a federal plan will be worth watching.

7. You don't spend a billion dollars and not have anything to show for it. "The Council recognizes the importance of measuring outcomes and impacts in order to achieve tangible results and ensure that funds are invested in a meaningful way." (7) There's an opening here for ecosystem services accounting, but we'll have to wait and see.

8. The money quote from the whole thing is the Council's definition of ecosystem restoration. That's kinda what they're about anyway:

"All activities, projects, methods, and procedures appropriate to enhance the health and resilience of the Gulf Coast ecosystem, as measured in terms of the physical, biological, or chemical properties of the ecosystem, or the services it provides, and to strengthen its ability to support the diverse economies, communities, and cultures of the region. It includes activity that initiates or accelerates the recovery of an ecosystem with respect to its health, integrity, and sustainability. It also includes protecting and conserving ecosystems so they can continue to reduce impacts from tropical storms and other disasters, support robust economies, and assist in mitigating and adapting to the impacts of climate change (per Executive Order 13554)."

There's a lot going on here! What is restoration? Well, it's not just bulldozers and backhoes, it's methods and procedures. In other words, it's science and technical expertise just as much as it is new wetlands. Watch for this to become controversial, with conservationists claiming that not enough money is being spent on the ground in actual projects. What's the goal? Health, resilience, and mitigation of climate impacts. It's not clear to me that there isn't potentially a huge tradeoff between the ecosystem health and ability to mitigate climate impacts, but we'll see. How do you get there? You initiate or accelerate recover, or you protect and conserve. And finally, how do you measure it all? Straight out of the CWA, it's physical, biological, or chemical properties. Or, ecosystem services.

9. The last point is, again, the Council won't be just drawing on existing marine and wetland science, and they won't just be incorporating the best available science as it hits the presses, they're producing it. The sense is that there's a lot yet to figure out yet in the planning, technical assistance, and implementation phases of restoration, and that the Council is more than ready to dish out money to "evaluation and establishment of monitoring requirements and methods to report outcomes and impacts; and measurement, evaluation, and reporting of outcomes and impacts of restoration activities." (15) The question will be, what kind of science is the Council interested in funding?

Militant climate particularism?

Militant climate particularism: it's a mouthful, but it's an idea to follow-up on recent posts about the tensions between local and global problems and solutions when it comes to restoring ecosystem services in the face of climate change.

Flood mitigation is an ecosystem service that this driver who abandoned their Ferrari during some recent severe flooding in Toronto, ON, Canada sorely could have used. Poor guy.

Don't feel to bad for 'em. In an editorial, the National Post argues for bailing out that driver and all the rich dudes who in the future may face that most dreaded decision to ditch their $200k PCV. Why spend money on climate mitigation - wind turbines, solar panels, and carbon sequestration - the newspaper asks, when what these floods and those recently in Alberta tell us is that we need to adapt to changing weather patterns.

Ignore the gross misunderstanding of climate science here (i.e. their claim that there is no link between extreme weather and climate change and that such extreme weather events and the problems they cause are entirely predictable), and even set aside the fact that this is the worst of "climate resignation" - giving up on the goal of preventing high concentrations of GHGs. Whistle past the part about the limited growth in renewables. Just about the only thing the editorial might have right is that carbon sequestration and offsetting are rabbit holes not worth falling into.

But what the National Post is calling for is not any flavor of "climate protectionism" either. Yea, they'd rather keep money in the province, but they're proposing raising tariffs on goods coming in from countries without carbon markets, because they're arguing against setting up something like a carbon market to being with. They're not suggesting taxing imported turbines and panels - the NP would rather have the province abandon new renewable energy projects all together. The argument here isn't even "climate austerity", in which taking action on climate change is believed to be the fix for shoring up dwindling coffers.

So what's going on here with the newspaper's utter rejection of climate as anything but a very local problem? David Harvey uses the term "militant particularism" to describe social movements that are based on particular struggles in particular times and places. He worries that although such struggles can produce intense solidarities and achieve immediately positive and perhaps necessary results, they often aren't informed by - and in turn contribute to - broader movements and approaches. These particular struggles may tend toward single issues over a short time frame, employing responsive tactics rather than embracing a long term strategy.

That's exactly what's going on with the Post's editorial: let's fix the problems of climate - which amount only to extreme weather - here and now, and call it a day. Let the Pacific Islanders eat carbonated saltwater.

Now, the National Post is a conservative rag, and what their approach would hardly fall within the realm of what would be called socially progressive to begin with. But as the drive towards climate resilience and adaptation grows stronger, we may see a retreat from the left into a militant climate particularism, where all that matters is saving in particular the city (After all, with all the doom and gloom that surrounds impending climate change as an urban phenomenon, it's easy to think: we have to do everything we can, here and now!). The idea that cities - "smart cities" especially - are at the heart of responding to a changing climate - and may be best suited to addressing ecosystem service provision - is perhaps the germ of this. Maybe. But even the influential US Mayors' Climate Protection Agreement is primarily about reducing carbon emissions. The question is, to what extent can climate planning qua city design overcome that most perennial problem of urban planning: the idea that the city is a containerized unit apart from the rest of the world.

At any rate, I can't imagine that a Toronto-only strategy is something the city will ultimately benefit from, at least with this guy in charge.